Wednesday, September 30, 2009

retirees pass up leisure world for the real world

My favorite aunt lives in Columbia Heights. She is retired, if retirement means collecting antiques to sell and working at a bank just to meet people. She and my uncle, who is officially retired, circumnavigate the District by foot and Metro, seeing friends, running errands, and simply enjoying the city. My mother, in her work appraising short-sale houses, recently discovered how cheap it is to buy a place in Leisure World, the city-sized, gated retirement community at Georgia and Norbeck. And she's taken it upon herself to convince her sister and brother-in-law that they should finally move to the suburbs.

Convinced that somehow I'd talk them out of it, my mother drove me around Leisure World to stop me from meddling in her meddling. "Look," she says, "it's so pretty! They can walk around." (We see a guy in a golf cart, a woman watering her lawn, but no one walking.) "But there aren't any sidewalks," I reply. "How will they get to the grocery store?" "They can drive there," my mother said.

You see, old people are cool now. (My aunt is not quite old, but still cool.) They play Nintendo Wii and write blogs and laugh at the line of Buicks snaking from Riderwood Village to the McDonald's across Cherry Hill Road, all with their blinkers going. Pretty soon most retirement homes will look like my freshman-year dorm but with an earlier bedtime. And as the baby boomers get older, I seriously wonder if places like Leisure World or Riderwood will stay relevant.

Earlier generations of seniors loved these places because they were safe, self-contained, and filled with people like them. Leisure World has three gated entrances, two golf courses and a shopping center. Riderwood's nineteen apartment buildings and "Town Center" clubhouse are connected by skybridges, relieving their occupants of even having to go outside. If you can drive, these places are fine. But if you can't or don't want to drive, you're basically screwed. My aunt hasn't driven in fifteen years. Why would she and my uncle move from Metro-accessible Columbia Heights to a cul-de-sac three miles north of Glenmont? It's not like they've got kids and are worrying about schools and bedrooms.

There's nothing wrong with retirement homes. Why shouldn't I want to hang out with people who remember the same old songs I do and also have plenty of time to kill? But when those retirement homes morph into retirement compounds, where I've got a security guard keeping the rest of the world at bay, I'm not as enthused. Nor are people who actually are retired. Today's seniors are "aging in place," hiring local builders to retrofit their old homes to make them safe for years to come. Or they're banding together with fellow retirees to form "naturally occurring retirement communities," as one Fairfax County neighborhood is doing.

Or they're tackling the physical form of the neighborhood itself, bringing a little piece of the city to the suburbs where they raised families decades before. Outside of Atlanta, Fayetteville and Mableton are both turning their strip-malls into retiree-friendly town centers, building sidewalks, mixing uses, and increasing density so that everything is within walking distance. The end result won't be too different than what we already have here in Downtown Silver Spring or Rockville Town Square. But bringing retirees into the discussion recognizes that they stand to benefit from good urbanism as well, whether it's freedom from driving or from budget pressures:

"Space is something we thought we had to have" in the suburbs, says Ms. Trammell, age 74. "But we can't afford that today—time-wise or money-wise. Putting a single house on a one-acre lot means more street in front of that house, longer electric and gas lines to run to the house, more yard and shrubs to cut, and a bigger property-tax bill for the owners. We're all tired of that. I know I am."

The city, it seems, is where the young and old meet. Sort of. There are large groups of both who want walkable, accessible, sociable places, but I don't know if how many seniors would move to Adams Morgan, as walkable, accessible and sociable it is. But they're already moving to neighborhoods in the District and throughout the region that provide some form of urban life. These are places that provide the low-maintenance lifestyle retirees want and need with the independence that communities like Leisure World and Riderwood can't offer.

It's not surprising that baby boomers are turning away from gated retirement complexes to real neighborhoods. After all, they're more likely than I am to remember a time when people weren't stuck in their cars. And it allows them to live out retirement with the same vitality they've always enjoyed. As for my aunt and uncle, they still haven't moved to Leisure World. "Why would I want to live out there?" She keeps asking. "The houses are nice, but we don't need all that space."

7 comments:

It depends greatly on the wishes of the person in question. For some people, retirement communities like Leisure World are a great option. Others, like my parents, prefer to live in the house they bought in 1961.

Actually, you don't have to drive or own a car if you live at Riderwood. Shuttle buses take people to shopping centers or the grocery store and arrangements can be made to get to an airport. Most people in Riderwood are in their 80s and up and not driving that much anyway. Riderwood is great for people with mobility issues as it is easy to get around in a wheelchair there.

I have often wondered what retirement will look like for people my age. I, for one, could never live in something called, "Leisure World." (Cue the Sansabelt trousers and white loafers.) Maybe if the new CR zoning (where commercial/residential reside together) works out, as in the pending Kensington Sector Plan, places like LW will be as anachronistic as they sound.

Leisure world does have frequent shuttle buses that get people to and from the shopping center and make reular trips to local doctors, etc. That said, the LW life is not for me!

One problem that the aging population faces is that, in the DC area at least, very few one level homes (attached or detached) have been built in the last 50 years. And, as land is now so expensive, the builders who are targeting older buyers are bulding those "active 55 and over" communities (with modestly sized, one level homes) way out in the outer burbs.

... when those retirement homes morph into retirement compounds, where I've got a security guard keeping the rest of the world at bay, I'm not as enthused.

Dan, if you bother to look at the crime statistics for the neighborhoods surrounding Leisure World -- especially those just across Bel Pre Road, you'd understand the fences and the gates.

A lot of the elders are fairly frail and really don't need to be regularly getting beat up and robbed, it's bad enough that the 'fence hoppers' come in and steal anything left unattended in cars left outside of secured parking.

I like the set-up at Riderwood - very like a college campus - with the quads centered ona shared dining room. More bus transit there would be nice but they do have shopping shuttles and a full list of excursions for the retirees to go to downtown plays, museums, etc. I've never like Leisure World's centering ona golf course, but hey, maybe when I'm 70, I'll change my mind on that.

After the last campaign, I attended a few meetings up at Leisure World, and one note that was constantly sounded was the concern of the elders for Security.

I did not hear a single voice raised requesting less security.

Additionally, this was shortly after a police chase led to the quarry attempting to enter Leisure World by going through the exit lane past the security shack.

Despite the totally random and one-time nature of this, still, at least one senior was sufficiently concerned to discover even one possible gap in the defenses that he raised the issue of possibly installing a one-way "spike strip" direction control feature comparable to what used to be seen at Drive-In Movie parks, to prevent people from backing in through the out lane. "Severe tire damage will result" reads the warning sign.

While the gentleman making the observation and request didn't exactly get a standing ovation, a lot of murmur of "hear hear" went around the room.

My own mother, of course, is "aging in place", and we prefer that for a variety of reasons. For one, I live here too and can and do take care of the grounds and anything that doesn't require a licensed professional. We also have a fairly large percentage of people living here who are in varying stages of the same situation, healthy and mobile elders enjoying their retirement at the homes they finished paying off 30 years ago.

Yet as the neighborhood changes, and becomes both much younger and much more foreign in terms of demographic average, more and more of the elders are talking about "wouldn't it be nice to live some place where we had actual Security..."